


There's something tragic about you

by wobblyheadeddollcaper



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Blow Jobs, Christmas Music, Love Confessions, M/M, submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-06-27 11:20:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19789831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wobblyheadeddollcaper/pseuds/wobblyheadeddollcaper
Summary: Crowley loves Aziraphale, and he deeply resents this fact."Love, despair, exasperation; backflip, dismount, ten points from the Russian judge."





	1. Chapter 1

13 years before the End of the World:

Christmas music spilled out of the shops along Oxford Street, and the festive lights twinkled merrily on the human misery below. Crowley watched a shop assistant drag on a cigarette as if nicotine alone could save her life, smoking it down to the filter before heading reluctantly back in to face the opening scream of Slade's 'Merry Christmas'. Aziraphale sighed beatifically, and Crowley followed his gaze to see a small, grubby child gazing wonderingly at a nativity scene.

The balance was still balanced, then.

“Are you busy over the next week or so?” Aziraphale inquired as they walked.

“No more than usual – couple of media campaigns to inspire, that's all. Why?”

"I have a rather cunning plan for a miracle, but it needs two people, at opposite ends of the country."

"No, no, absolutely not.” Aziraphale stepped blithely onto the pedestrian crossing, and Crowley extended the red lights for ten seconds so that they could saunter across to the sound of car horns. “No way am I going to the countryside at this time of year - are you even listening?" Aziraphale was frowning at a patch of ice, which disappeared before anyone could step on it. “That's global warming, that is. Also, no.”

"It would be very virtuous, though! And it would leave me scot-free until mid-January. I'll owe you one."

Crowley failed to be in any way convinced, and conveyed this wordlessly.

"A big one?" Aziraphale said pleadingly, opening his eyes wide. 

Crowley succumbed to his customary internal cycle of annoyance, fondness, despair at the fondness, self-loathing, and exasperated equanimity. His unwarranted... affection for Aziraphale was not going anywhere, and he'd made and broken his peace with that several times over.

It was definitely just affection. Familiarity. Be isolated together for long enough and you can make friends with anything, right? Humans did it all the time, making friends with cockroaches and volleyballs and anything with a face, let alone handsome angels with well-hidden streaks of devilry. 

A demon should really be much better at lying to himself, he thought, and succumbed to the cycle again out of habit. Love, despair, exasperation; backflip, dismount, ten points from the Russian judge.

"Ugh. Go on then, tell me more about your doubtless completely asinine plan to restore the spirit of whatever." Crowley had invented the idea of guilt-trips after a few too many times when he'd said no to Aziraphale and then, somehow, winding up doing whatever it was he wanted anyway. He'd never mentioned it to Aziraphale, because the pouting would have reached near-lethal levels.

"To spread the message of Christmas." Aziraphale looked at him reproachfully, eyes as mournful and judgemental as a Victorian sentimental painting of a spaniel. "We're going to heal the sick and feed the hungry."

"You know I could achieve the same effect by catching two CEOs and a Cabinet Minister in flagrante delicto and publishing their pictures in the Sun."

"Not exactly to sort of thing to inspire festive joy and goodwill, is it?" Aziraphale said primly. “After you.” He ushered Crowley into a small, dimly lit cafe. The sound system fritzed briefly and began playing Aretha Franklin. The barista's face unravelled into a sort of agonised relief, and he forgot to charge them for their coffees. Aziraphale looked reprovingly at Crowley, who shrugged.

"Wasn't me. And maybe not festive joy as such, but it would last longer. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Dissolve a couple of NHS privatisation contracts and you cheapen his out-of-pocket medical costs so he can afford fish for life."

Aziraphle pursed his lips disapprovingly, the way he always did when he knew Crowley was right. Deep in Aziraphale's secret, ruthless heart he would be quite happy to let the ends justify the means, and every time Crowley pushed a clever idea towards him he had to confront that fact. Crowley really liked seeing Aziraphale's practical, steadfast core shine through from underneath all the fussing about rules.

“It would be for the greater good,” Crowley said sanctimoniously as they took their seats. Aziraphale huffed and stirred his flat white with slightly more vigour than necessary.

Needling was one of Crowley's chief pleasures. By rights it should have been torture or something else suitably malevolent, but with needling he got to be smug. It was, by inexplicable coincidence, also one of Aziraphale's chief pleasures, though Aziraphale always insisted that his pleasure came from 'leading someone towards the truth', the liar.

"Anyway," said Aziraphale, glaring at him, "this is not my plan. My plan is to miracle all the foodbanks full-"

"How exactly-"

"-by influencing people to donate, if-you-would-let-me-finish, and also to cure everyone's winter colds. Between West Wales and East Norfolk, we should be able to cover quite a swathe, so don't complain to me about getting stuck in Scotland in winter."

"That's a pretty big favour," Crowley said meditatively. "Are you really sure you want to owe me for that?"

"I - well - I'm sure it will be fine." Aziraphale said, looking guilty.

Crowley sat up straight.

"You ethereal bastard, you're not planning to pay me back!" Crowley was almost impressed. There was something fascinating about catching Aziraphale in a lie. Crowley tried not to imagine Aziraphale bending his principles too much, because it made him hopeful that those principles would bend far enough to admit other things, and hope was a very bad idea.

"No! Well - I'm more sort of... hoping you won't collect on that scale? It's not a big miracle, just a big area - like your phone network thingy."

Crowley slumped back in his seat and groaned. He should never have explained the idea of mass production.

"Dark Lord give me strength. All right, but you're the one who has to go to bloody Wales. I'm not driving the M4 this close to the holidays."

Aziraphale twinkled at him. Crowley sneered, but his heart wasn't in it. Aziraphale looked so genuinely happy, and he felt an answering smile creeping onto his face. 

He'd gone through a phase of giving himself pep-talks in the mirror, back when that had been fashionable; 'Go out there and be the worst demon you can be', 'You can't spell blaspheme without me', and so on. He'd become familiar with his own reflection, and the way his face changed when Aziraphale called or even just crossed his mind. It was embarrassing to know exactly how besotted that smile made him look, and he stopped talking to his reflection rather than have to face it regularly. (Also, he had a faint but ineradicable fear that one day Dagon would take over his image and start talking back.)

The Christmas season passed with significantly less aggregate human suffering than normal. On New Year, Crowley launched a media campaign for a new and completely unworkable diet plan, and the balance restored itself.


	2. Chapter 2

One week after the World failed to End:

After the whole body-switch trick, Crowley had presumed, in so far as he'd thought about it beyond 'We're not dead! Great!', that the Arrangement would continue on much as it always had. Not with the oversight, or in his case undersight, from greater powers, but the nice lunches, and the occasional drinking sessions, and the general push-and-pull of Aziraphale trying to do good where needed and Crowley trying to spread low-grade irritation in deserving quarters.

This assumption was severely challenged when Aziraphale followed him home from the Ritz – unprecedented – and took his hand in the lift up – extremely unprecedented, and impossible to acknowledge, so Crowley didn't. When he looked sideways Aziraphale was beaming at him.

“You look like you've been hit on the head,” Crowley said, trying to snipe and failing. It would have been more truthful the other way around – getting that much undivided angelic adoration was similar to taking a cricket bat to the skull. 

“I learned quite a lot from our little adventure,” Aziraphale said, gazing at him with soft, fond eyes, and Crowley felt a deep sense of unease. Aziraphale's hand was warm and surprisingly strong, their fingers curling together as Crowley pretended it wasn't happening.

Once in the flat Aziraphale took one look at the throne and visibly decided against mocking Crowley about it, instead turning to him and taking his other hand.

“I have a few things to say,” Aziraphale said, determined and hopeful.

“Must you?” Crowley said desperately.

Aziraphale looked at him sorrowfully, in the manner of a Victorian-era spaniel who has done something unspeakable on the mistress's rug.

"I can't help but feel that I owe you an apology for my assumptions, and my behaviour. Our switching places opened my eyes, and I'm very sorry that I assumed you couldn't feel, well, feel the way you do, and-"

Crowley pulled his hands free of Aziraphale's, cold dread trickling down his spine.

"Whatever you think you know about my feelings, you're wrong."

"I feel I've practically coerced you into doing miracles, playing on your affection for me." Aziraphale wrung his hands.

"You what?" Denial, it turned out, was completely ineffective as a coping strategy when bloody interfering angels went prying in bodies where they didn't belong.

"Suffering from the pangs of love as you were-"

Crowley recoiled in visceral horror.

"Ack! No, stop that right now-"

"Well, what do you want to call it?" Aziraphale sounded annoyed, which was reassuringly familiar after the bizarre sincerity of the last five minutes.

"...I have, maybe, a vague fondness. For you." Crowley bit out. “I don't want you to apologise to me about it.” Or acknowledge it, or know it in any way.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes.

"Oh for Heaven's sake. Vague fondness is what you feel for Rioja, or modernist architecture. I was inside your form, Crowley, I felt love-"

"One more word,” Crowley snarled, “and I will... I'll sod off to, to Azerbaijan or something. For at least a century."

There was a long, awkward silence.

"Suffering is a very apt description, by the way." Crowley sulked. "If anything is happening, it's definitely not enjoyable."

"I love you too, you know," Aziraphale complained.

Crowley laughed, a dry thing utterly unacquainted with amusement.

“You obviously don't,” he said, his own voice ragged in his ears. “Or why is it I never talk you into performing giant Christmas miracles or tarnishing a soul or two? And somehow you drag me into popularising bloody Hamlet and saving you from Nazis."

"Because, I believe, you want to do good. Deep down you rather like saving people." Aziraphale smiled at him approvingly, and Crowley hunched his shoulders and wished desperately to be a snake, so he wouldn't have this annoying, horribly readable, human face.

"You're on very thin ice, angel. Watch it." Crowley hissed.

"Not to be vulgar, dear boy, but you can stop bullshitting now." Aziraphale looked slightly shocked at himself, but pushed on. "We can face the truth. No one's listening any more. I'm an angelic petty hedonist and you're a demonic lover of humanity and we have, improbably, wonderfully, converged."

Crowley felt uncomfortably naked.

"I was actually hoping that now we're free agents, we could converge a bit more... freely, as it were. I was planning to work round to that after the apology."

"Oooh, shall we meet up for tea?" Crowley said, his voice sliding into mockery. "Go to the movies? What other heavenly delights do you have planned?" 

“I thought we could live together and perhaps see what this sex lark is about," Aziraphale said snippily. “If you're quite done picking a fight with me.”

Crowley swallowed once, his mouth dry.

It was almost everything he wanted, everything he had desperately pushed down and ignored. It was his stupid, impossible dreams dragged into the light and thrown at him, as offhanded and insulting as a slap in the face.

He might actually cry, he realised in horror.

"Crowley?"

"I have to..." He turned and stumbled towards the door, removing his sunglasses to run a shaking hand down his face. 

“Oh no, what have I done now?” Aziraphale's worried voice trailed after him, and Crowley walked faster. “Crowley, it's your flat, you can't leave!”

“Give me a moment, for pity's sake,” Crowley said, his voice unrecognisable in his own ears. He sank down to sit against the wall.

“Oh my poor darling,” Aziraphale said, sounding terrified. “I'm sorry, let me try again? I'll do it better this time.” He knelt in front of Crowley, his hands fluttering as if they didn't know quite where to safely land.

“Do what, rip my heart out?” He couldn't stop the words, and they came tumbling out from his mouth like stones. “I've been following you around like a stray cat, and the only consolation I've had has been that you didn't know how pathetic I was.” 

“You are not,” Aziraphale said furiously, “anything close to pathetic. You're wonderful. I think you're absolutely wonderful, my dear.” He put his hands on Crowley's shoulders, steadying them both.

Crowley's eyes burned. He couldn't look up, but it was impossible to spend another second not knowing. He met Aziraphale's eyes, and he wasn't lying, not even a little.

“Let me start again.” Aziraphale said softly. “I love you, and it's come to my attention that you, against all expectation, may love me. So I was hoping we could... be in love, together.”

It was something like the walls of Jericho falling, and something like the swelling strings of an orchestra.

“Much better,” Crowley said, when he thought he could speak again. “And I definitely do love you.” 

“Good,” Aziraphale said, looking enormously relieved.


	3. Chapter 3

There was a certain amount of getting up, straightening clothes and so on. Crowley used the time to pull together a semblance of dignity. Aziraphale used the time to apparently spiral into a particularly fey species of fluster.

“I really am sorry, Crowley.”

“I'm fine, it's fine,” Crowley said, and almost believed it. He couldn't figure out where to put his hands.

“I suppose you didn't pick up anything new from, um, being in my body?”

“Nothing I didn't already know,” Crowley said. “I mean, that whole sensing love thing is your side, not mine. Your body enjoys physical things quite a lot, but I could have guessed that from watching you eat a chocolate eclair.” He stepped a little closer to Aziraphale, till they were standing only a few inches apart.

“Physical... things?” Aziraphale turned slightly pink around the ears. Crowley smiled, delighted at this evidence of a filthy mind. Aziraphale blushed harder.

“Ice cream, angel. Though –“ Crowley leaned in till his lips were almost brushing Aziraphale's ear, “I always wanted to ask, have you tried sex?”

He had, despite spending considerable exertion trying not to think about it, already spent a few hundred years considering whether Aziraphale's appetite for carnal pleasures such as ripe fruit, soft fabrics and fine wines might extend to sex, and whether he would make the same sorts of noises. He could therefore approach the subject with a little more urbanity than Aziraphale. He hoped so, at least. He wanted something he could take the lead on, some way to even the playing field so Aziraphale would lose that soft, worried look.

“I, well, yes. Sort of.” Aziraphale licked his lips.

Crowley filed that away for questions at some later point, and returned to the goal at hand. Seduce Aziraphale, be suave and precise and gentle, draw him out into exquisite agonies of love.

“You haven't tried it with me.” He made every word a promise – it will be better with me, it will be best with me.

“We don't have to try it this second.” Aziraphale looked like he was watching the dessert trolley roll past their table.

“But you want to,” Crowley murmured, as salaciously as he could manage, which was really quite salacious indeed. “I can make it really good for you.” His earlier panic was transmuting into a driving need.

“Yes, but you were very upset just now,” Aziraphale said, though he didn't seem to be paying much attention to his own words. He was watching Crowley's mouth with ravenous intensity. “And I have no doubt at all that it will be, that you will be, we will be, rather wonderful; though of course we have plenty of time to practice-”

“I'm not upset now.” Crowley raised his eyebrows. Aziraphale bit his lip. “Come on, what about just a kiss?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Aziraphale said, giving into temptation. Crowley turned his head, their lips only an inch apart, and he had a brief moment of overwhelming anticipation before Aziraphale's eyes fluttered shut, and he leaned in and kissed Crowley tenderly, his mouth soft and sweet and yielding.

What Crowley hadn't considered was how different it would be doing this with someone he loved. Someone who would still be around in a hundred years; someone who, if he messed this up, would remember it. It felt momentous, it felt like parts of his mind he'd never used before were being turned on for the first time. He forgot for a moment about seducing Aziraphale, and just existed in the kiss.

They kept kissing, long, lush kisses that flowed between them like honey, and then slowed further until they came to a natural end.

“Lovely,” Aziraphale said, sincerely. “You are perfectly lovely.” His arms were still wrapped around Crowley, and one of his hands was stroking the back of Crowley's neck, sending shivers down his spine.

“Aziraphale?”

“Yes?” The look of adoration on Aziraphale's face was almost jarring, so perfect it seemed like a flaw in reality. Crowley wanted to break it, to do something to root them back to the Earth.

“Do you want-”

“What do you want?” Aziraphale interrupted. “I want to make it good for you, darling, you keep offering me things and I want to give-”

“Will you just take me, please?” Crowley complained.

Aziraphale leaned into him and pressed their lips together with rather more force than finesse. Crowley opened his mouth, and Aziraphale made a guttural, needy sound and pushed him up against the wall. He kissed Crowley eagerly, hungrily, and then leaned in further, his hands braced either side of Crowley's head, bracketing him in as Aziraphale dug his teeth into the muscle of Crowley's neck. Crowley made a noise that he would later deny was a whimper.

“You – ,” Crowley gasped. 

“May I,” Aziraphale moaned. “I want-”

“Yes, come on, angel, don't stop-”

They kissed up against the wall, slow and hard and savage, until Crowley felt as though he might spontaneously combust.

“Clothes,” he said, breaking off the kiss. “Bed.”

Aziraphale grabbed a fistful of his shirt and towed him to Crowley's bedroom, throwing him onto the bed.

“Bloody hell, where have you been hiding this?” Crowley said, lying back and trying to catch his breath as he eeled out of his infernally tight trousers, toeing off his shoes at the same time.

Aziraphale stopped wriggling out of his shirt and started to look embarrassed.

“No complaints!” Crowley blurted out quickly. “Strip, get over here, any second you're not in bed with me is a fucking crime.”

Aziraphale made a strangled sound and miracled the rest of his clothes away before flinging himself naked onto the bed next to Crowley and kissing him again, manhandling Crowley until they were grinding against each other.

“I want to be in you,” Aziraphale said, gasping. Crowley felt a spike of lust so intense he could only clutch at Aziraphale for a moment, before finding his voice.

“Do it, take me-” His breath caught as Aziraphale came messily over both of them, shuddering in Crowley's arms.

“Oh Lord,” Aziraphale said, looking flushed and glowingly happy. “I'm sorry, that was rather fast, wasn't it.”

“Please,” Crowley said urgently, “I want to-”

“Oh my dear, yes,” Azirphale said, and moved down the bed to wrap his lips round the head of Crowley's cock. Crowley's head thumped back against the pillow, his thighs trembling a little as he fought the urge to thrust up into Aziraphale's mouth. 

Aziraphale pulled one of Crowley's hands from where it was gripping the sheets and put it on his head, making a few pointed gestures to indicate that yes, Crowley could go ahead and - 

Crowley moved, a shallow thrust at first, and then deeper, his eyes closing in ecstasy as he felt Aziraphale moan round his cock, and then snapping open to devour the sight of his fist in Aziraphale's hair, the slick wetness of his mouth.

“I'm-” he said, pushing at Aziraphale's forehead, and Aziraphale moved his hand away firmly and took Crowley's cock further into his mouth.

Aziraphale swallowed him deep and Crowley came, feeling as though his orgasm had been dragged out of him.

“That wasn't what I expected at all,” Crowley said, looking at the ceiling and feeling vaguely as though he'd been run over by a train. A stray thought about the gentle, slow seduction he'd had planned struggled to the surface of his mind, and promptly drowned in endorphins, never to be heard from again.

“Well, it has been a very long build up.” Aziraphale said judiciously. “I'm sure we'll get our chance to go slow another time.”

“All the chances you like,” Crowley said sincerely, and Aziraphale beamed like a small blond sun.


End file.
